Privilege Escalations
Privilege escalation is the process of going from a relatively low level of access rights to gaining the privileges of an administrator, the system, or even greater access privileges. It allows the penetration tester to own all aspects of a system’s operations. More importantly, obtaining some access privileges will allow testers to control all systems across a network. As vulnerabilities become more difficult to find and exploit, a significant amount of research has been conducted into privilege escalation as a means of ensuring a successful penetration test.
In this chapter, we will look at the following topics:
- Common escalation methodology
- Local system escalation
- DLL injection
- Credential harvesting through sniffing and escalation
- Golden ticket attack on Kerberos
- Active Directory access rights